The Faroe Islands Diary. Part One.

I sit by the ancient sea. It is in mourning, whilst also in joy. Scaling waves- if I smudge my eyes the surface turns into a fuzzy television screen, but instead of a beetling blanket of monochrome tonalities, I see enough shades of blue through to grey and green to keep me in colour for the expanse of this trip and beyond.

When light pockets break through the cloud covered sky, the hills and rocks are rouged in soft spots...as if softened by a master stroke, a saintly makeup artist blushing green slopes and grey rushes with a powder paint luminosity. Forever shifting, these mountains of grey green curl around the sea and stretch up into the sky, immobile giants, grand and quiet, telling us to speak happily, in truth, to be- just be.

There is a cottage with a grass roof- bluebells shoot up by a stone chimney, and further past- a small wooden white church steeple, the brightest spot in my gaze. Corrugated rust roofed cabins and boat sheds, blocked in mismatching bottle greens, repainted, over painted, restored and rotting all at once.

From here the mountain streams look like small rivulets threading between green grass rock, gently joining the sea at the bottom. Up close the water courses passionately downwards, sharply cold and merry.

...

She finds herself thinking about things like- did Matisse smoke, and if so, how many a day and what brand? Or would he have smoked roll ups? She goes around the small house and counts the candles. 22, maybe more, maybe less, she almost lost count as she came upon a bundle of photographs on the dresser. She suspects this was the granny annex, and these pictures must have belonged to the granny herself. In the kitchen there is a prayer stuck on the fridge in Danish, an angel cut out taped to the bottom, below 'Amen'. Glass jars with big red hearts on them, a doll in red and a clear spotty vinyl tablecloth. You can see the grain of the wood through it. She quite likes it, but has no idea why. Back home she might find this repulsive. Probably not though.

There is a painting on the wall to the front, the one with the two windows which look out onto the sea, with the rocks and the roofs. It is dated- 1976. Before she existed. She thinks of who might have painted it...possibly someone in the family, maybe even someone who lives upstairs...or perhaps too young. It depicts a billowy sky, puffy grey clouds overlooking a valley by the sea. It could almost be a third, middle window, joining the two either side of it, filing in the bit the brick wall covers up. Nothing really changes here- that is the impression she gets after two days on the island. 

...

Jay said this morning that he imagined that this is what Cornwall must have looked like hundreds of years ago when the first settlers made it home. I think he is right. We cannot get an internet signal or more than one television channel, but I almost love this. It probably wouldn't be so fitting for the house to be decked out in gadgets and slick factory made mechanics. The one channel television is so big you could probably put it on it's side and set sail in it to the next island. There is a silver and grey boom box on the dining table in the spotty wrap, that looks as if it has made it's way from the seventies. I think it has. The only curves that belong to it are those of the three knobs on the front- volume, balance and tuning. 'Soft touch operation' , sounds like a good name for a band, though I am sure mostly everyone would disagree with me.

The men have been at the site all day. It has been me, the computer, the paintbox and the brushes. I smoked three cigarettes to get rid of them, and drank three cups of coffee, black, made with the wobbly filter machine (after swearing off coffee for the next two weeks). We in fact, have twelve days left. Two gone and a lot done. Although, like I say, I feel the men are really the ones who are getting a lot done. I was instructed to stay home today, probably because I am a somewhat feather brained girl who is really no good at constructing shelters for cameras in the rain and wind. 

Visiting the site for the first time yesterday I kind of felt like I might blow off a cliff, but my heavy bones kept me in place. The jutting wind and wet sap pelting from the sky made me feel like such a girl. I did my best to keep smiling, suggesting, and not fretting. I managed to portray a part rugged tom boy, imagining (or hoping) I had strolled straight from the pages of an Enid Blyton tale- three children, two boys and one (tom) girl, putting  up a den from found bits of wood and net and string, although in reality we were actually using power tools, chipboard and bright blue plastic sheeting to keep the rain out. 

...

Tuesday.

The hut is done. The camera is set. Snip snip snip...click, the photographs are being taken as I type this, over a hill in a hut being drizzled with rain. The day has come to us in greys and greens and chalk whites, wet yet not windy. Yesterday I stayed at home alone, feeling a little like a fishermans wife, twiddling internal thumbs and making a rice pudding that would fill the bellies of the men hard at work on a cliffs edge. Thankfully for us all, the rain had stopped. The men were out all day, icing the cake, and placing tiny marzipan huts and mountains on top. I managed an exit from the wooden annexe and took a stroll and a lie down to the grassy cliffs edge on the outskirts of the village. (merely three minutes from our door). 

I ended up feeling a little lonely. Speaking to my oldest friend on the phone that morning lifted me- I had not imagined that being in such a beautiful, solitary place would have me turning in circles. I've always considered myself a bit of a loner, happy to me by myself, but perhaps only in a crowd. In the middle of an epic, lonely landscape, I realise I could lose my mind quite quickly. My sanity or my heart. I seem to have forgotten how to smile naturally, or how to be quietly content. I managed to read the rest of my book yesterday, the finale making my heart sway again in it's seat. I remembered my essence for a snatch of a moment, and then again later on as I tried to do tree pose asana in the kitchen on the wooden floor, unsocked and silent.

Today the Artist who we are working for flew back to London. He arrived yesterday afternoon to check the camera for the final set up, give the thumbs up, the big Faroe go ahead. Smooth times ensued and after my day spent alone, at seven the car pulled up and I was whisked away for two pints of Faroe lager at our local pub-the bar at the airport hotel. With the conscience of a naughty child I smoked a cigarette on a hillock outside the hotel, peering at another mountain and talking to myself out loud about love- all its twists, and furrows and frailties. I seemed to be a in almost good mood, but still felt I had some kind of darkening cloud to shift from view. 

Darren cooked for us back at home, a wholesome fish stew, and the rice pudding was heated and served, although Darren had to go back to his abode (a caravan on the camera cliff site as it was getting late, but he did have some for breakfast which gave me the feeling of having been helpful in some very small way).

Now we languish after cheese on toast for lunch as the rain shows no sign of leaving these hills. I feel lightly uneasy, yet remind myself over and over to be strong and appreciate every moment for what it is. Nothing more, nothing less.

Wednesday.

Midlake reaches my ears. I sit on the overweight and puffy black leather sofa after having finished dividing the one and a half thousand images from yesterday and this morning onto the computer, each minute tucked up safely in its proper place, a bed within an hour within a day on external hard drive A and external hard drive B. I can hear the wet car pull up now. Two boys, two men, going to come inside, probably having been at the airport hotel bar.

Lets see.

A groan. 

FISH!

Cripes. They just came in clutching a clear plastic bag full of silvery blue fish, that they caught themselves, in the rain! Wow. And there I was thinking they had been downing pints of Faroese lager. 

The lesson- never jump to assumptions, nor conclusions for that matter!

Dinner tonight will probably be fish then. But there I go making assumptions again, drawn only from the secondary assumption that when men catch fish, they do not deep freeze it, or leave it for later...they eat it NOW! (Now! being later on tonight, so not truly now, but you catch my driftwood). (Ha).

Learning was the word of the day. Julian Benjamin taught me (told me) how to perform a miraculous (perhaps) image grab from the screen display of a mac. Then there was the double sweep scroll on the ibook mousepad- something I have been ashamedly in the dark about, but what joy to discover these golden shortcuts! On top of this I also learnt what a Faroese buffet means.

Let me share my findings with you.

A faroese buffet, put on in an airport hotel restaurant starts with the conventional buffet table. A few tables, covered in green cloth and thin paper, with a few boxes on top, covered in green cloth and thin paper, perhaps echoing the green mountains we can see beyond the buffet bread basket, through the large, conventional windows.  We then survey the buffet food itself. Some plates contain pieces of cut out fruit- fruit impersonating spiky fruit, or fruit showing the best of it's internal flesh, yet saying 'i look so juicy, look at my segments, but don't touch! Hands off I say! I am enticing yet spiky! I am now completely pointless-but beautiful!'.  Unfortunately the spiked fruit garnish lends nothing of any worth to the silver plated school dinner spread, yet on the up side there was no sign of a tomato rose

Mid-warm boiled potatoes, maybe been in the sun too long, peeling noses and foreheads. Next door we find meat something, meat something else and then some real meat, pork, in original form, and not too bad in the mouth. 

A heady array of canned sweet corn, pickled olives, cubes of pepper, and sliced onions awaits me. I dive in, fill the plate, up up up and up and then sit down and eat meat with salty, thick brown gravy and biled potatoes, said sweet corn and some whitefish I completely forgot to mention, but am sure you have not truly missed hearing about.

The fusty spread made me smile. I ate like an animal who had not eaten since breakfast, as did Jay sitting opposite me. Except that halfway through Jay's first course he found out a bit late that he had mistaken apple trifle for tuna pate. It made my heart melt that he still ate it all up with his gravied meat.  We both digged into seconds, then ate the trifle at the correct time. It was badly delicious, making me feel both ill and delighted all at once. 

Jay talked about something dirty and made me shift in my wool mix seat. He said we should go downstairs to the toilets and fuck, but we ended up drinking some gravelly coffee and gossiping like a pair of old ladies with nothing much to do.

Remains of the day were spent surviving the rain, visiting the site, wiping down the camera lens, studying the internals of each and every caravan cupboard and using it's minature dolls house toilet...then onto the filing.

Dividing, comparing, deleting, reassuring myself I was not losing my will to live.

A joke.